Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

By : Marco Castorina, Gabriel Sassone
5 (2)
Book Image

Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan

5 (2)
By: Marco Castorina, Gabriel Sassone

Overview of this book

Vulkan is now an established and flexible multi-platform graphics API. It has been adopted in many industries, including game development, medical imaging, movie productions, and media playback but learning it can be a daunting challenge due to its low-level, complex nature. Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan is designed to help you overcome this difficulty, providing a practical approach to learning one of the most advanced graphics APIs. In Mastering Graphics Programming with Vulkan, you’ll focus on building a high-performance rendering engine from the ground up. You’ll explore Vulkan’s advanced features, such as pipeline layouts, resource barriers, and GPU-driven rendering, to automate tedious tasks and create efficient workflows. Additionally, you'll delve into cutting-edge techniques like mesh shaders and real-time ray tracing, elevating your graphics programming to the next level. By the end of this book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of modern rendering engines to confidently handle large-scale projects. Whether you're developing games, simulations, or visual effects, this guide will equip you with the skills and knowledge to harness Vulkan’s full potential.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1: Foundations of a Modern Rendering Engine
7
Part 2: GPU-Driven Rendering
13
Part 3: Advanced Rendering Techniques

Summary

In this chapter, we described how to implement ray-traced reflections. We started with an overview of screen-space reflection, a technique that was used for many years before ray tracing hardware was available. We explained how it works and some of its limitations.

Next, we described our ray tracing implementation to determine reflection values. We provided two methods to determine the reflected ray direction and explained how the reflected color is computed if a hit is returned.

Since we only use one sample per fragment, the result of this step is noisy. To reduce as much of this noise as possible, we implemented a denoiser based on SVGF. This technique consists of three passes. First, there’s a temporal accumulation step to compute color and luminance moments. Then, we compute the luminance variance. Finally, we process the color output by passing it through five iterations of a wavelet filter.

This chapter also concludes our book! We hope you enjoyed reading...